Apple: Cross-OS touchscreen Mac a “waste of energy”

Apple has ruled out manufacturing a touchscreen Mac laptop or desktop after dubbing it a “waste of energy” and seemingly denying that recent patent filings have anything to do with adding this feature to its computers.

The Cupertino based firm told MacWorld that its devices won’t be incorporating a touch screen any time soon and it also won’t be converging iOS and OS X for the sake of convergence.

“It’s obvious and easy enough to slap a touchscreen on a piece of hardware, but is that a good experience? We believe no”, said Craig Federighi, head of software at Apple. “To say [OS X and iOS] should be the same, independent of their purpose? Let’s just converge, for the sake of convergence? [It’s] absolutely a non-goal.”

This was a view echoed by other members of staff at Apple and conflicts with Microsoft’s rumoured strategy of creating an OS to rule them all with Windows 9.

“We don’t waste time thinking, ‘but should it be one [interface]! How do you make these [operating systems] merge together?’ What a waste of energy that would be,” said Phil Schiller, senior VP of worldwide marketing at Apple.

Apple is seemingly determined to make sure the company’s primary OS experiences remain separate but that both still remain distinctly Apple and retain characteristics across the two.

“You don’t want to say the Mac became less good at being a Mac because someone tried to turn it into iOS. At the same time, you don’t want to feel like iOS was designed by [one] company and Mac was designed by [a different] company, and they’re different for reasons of lack of common vision,” Federighi added.

Even though Apple has always been tight-lipped on any tablet-laptop hybrids, rumours about a 13in iPad to complement the company’s Macbook have failed to disappear and this very public rebuttal only goes to back up earlier denials.